


Blue

by sparklight



Series: Colours [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Sibling Bonding, desert babies seeing water for the first time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-16
Updated: 2016-03-16
Packaged: 2018-05-27 03:21:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6267523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparklight/pseuds/sparklight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the night (rather, morning) after the Death Star has been destroyed. In seven hours she's supposed to be presiding over an award ceremony, and she's been up until late, but Leia can't sleep.</p><p>Then she spots Luke wandering out of the temple and follows him.</p><p>Otherwise; Luke seeing a substantial (if still small) amount of water in a single spot for the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue

She can't sleep.

She knows she _should_ ; the celebration went on late and tomorrow (today) is the award ceremony and then the evacuation will begin and it's so late it's _early_. And yet she can't sleep. She wanders the empty corridors of the old temple, avoiding the areas where the few people still awake are, and counts her steps. It's six or seven hours until she has to be ready, and she really should _try_ to sleep, but she can't.

So she wanders; through Tactical, past storage rooms, the living quarters, though she avoids the room she's been given--- 

The disappearing back of dirty off-white around a corner startles her, and while it could be anyone, Leia knows who it is. She doesn't want to talk, doesn't want that too-earnest gaze aimed at her, doesn't want... Her feet have already turned her in the direction Luke has gone, though, and she reasons she doesn't have to stay, wherever he's going. She'll just check if he's all right.

He might, after all, only be going to the 'fresher, and then she'll feel right silly.

But he doesn't.

She doesn't catch up to him until they're out of the temple, down a tentatively stomped-down path through unfamiliar bushes, vines and ancient, seemingly mountain-tall trees. He seems to know where he's going, which is odd, because he hasn't been here any longer than she has.

Leia finds Luke Skywalker, crack shot pilot, farm boy, and the Hero of the Rebellion, standing barefoot in dew-wet grass, at the edge of a pool.

His boots are on the ground beside him, half-hidden by some long-leafed grass. The tentative dawn is spinning a bare handful of strands into gold, casting the rest of his hair into sandy drabness. The sky above them is gray and violet, dominated still by the huge red sphere of Yavin, and through the trees, barely seen, is the burnished light of the dawning sun.

"... Luke?" Leia asks quietly, slipping up beside him after having stood behind him for more than a minute and not leaving as she said she would. 

He twitches, as if he hadn't actually noticed her at all before, and looks up from the pool with a startled, almost awkwardly _vulnerable_ expression on his face that is nothing like the grief he'd expressed in the _Falcon_ , after they'd escaped the Death Star.

"It's so _pure_ ," he mutters, and Leia blinks. Glances around them, then down at the water and up to Luke, tilting her head. He nods, managing a faint twitch of a smile and squats down, his hand hesitating over the surface of the pool. "And blue."

That, at least, she can easily agree with, even if she doesn't understand the quiet, nearly pained _reverence_ in his voice and face; the large pool is nearly as startlingly blue as some of the little mountain lakes on---

At---

Leia doesn't notice she's breathed in sharply, breath stuttering like her heart until another set of startling blue is looking up at her, concern replacing the earlier fragile expression on Luke's face. She shakes her head and sits down, unheeding of the dew on the grass, and curls her legs underneath her. 

The pool is achingly blue, even in the early dawn, with gentle ripples meandering out over the surface from the little waterfall on the opposite end, almost hidden between bushes and a riot of flowers.

"That's usually what water looks like," she says, determined, and is relieved it's not high noon or anything; the light doesn't reach this far down yet, and so there is no glitter on the surface to remind her--- She pushes the thought away, glances to Luke instead. With him squatted down beside her, the light can't reach his blond mop of hair either, and it looks neither brilliantly gold nor sand-drab.

It's just blond.

Blond hair on a lean young man crouching beside a pool of water, clad in clothes fit for a desert - though the building heat of the day will undoubtedly make them fit for later, too... except there's a faint smell of garbage clinging to them. He'll need something else for the ceremony, Leia realises.

"It usually just looked clear to me, or gray," Luke says, veering Leia's thoughts away from where they could find something that would fit Luke for the ceremony and back to the water again, and she's blinking. He glances at her, smiles faintly again. "On Tatooine. You never see this much of it... and if you do, it's the lowest grade water, the stuff that's not fit for drinking, just for use in the hydroponics. Uncle Owen would've gone _mad_ seeing all this just---"

He cuts himself off, his throat convulsing, and she recognises a similar feeling to what made her draw breath so harshly before.

There's something hot, angry and _wet_ behind her eyes suddenly, but Leia refuses to add to the water in this clearing, and grits her teeth, swallows, and leans forward. She grabs Luke's hand, still hesitating above the surface of the pool, and dunks it into the water.

"Leia--!"

He sounds so startled, so _outraged_ that the wet, painful thing retreats a little and she's left laughing, just a little.

"Cup your hand, Luke. No one owns this water." She glances at him as she says that, sees his eyes widen a little, his mouth drop open as if he finally made a connection, and she feels both smug and aching. 

Water. 

Something so simple as _water_ , piercing blue and starting to shift into different shades of the colour as the dawn rises higher, is something he's never thought to be free.

He still steals a glance at her, hesitant, but she just nods. He finally cups his hand and she lets go so he can turn it around and scoop some water up. He still pauses there, watching it trickle out of his palm and fall back into the pool. Then he repeats the motion with a certain energy and determination, leaning down over the edge to be able to catch some of the water in his palm before all of it has disappeared again.

She watches his expression clear and then twitch into something nearly pained again, pained and incredulous; as if he can't quite believe this is right here, like this, and so clean. If he was someone else, if _she_ was someone else (someone a few years younger, someone not drowning under the weight of her home gone) she might have pushed him in.

She doesn't, though, just meets Luke's wide-eyed, slightly startled smile as he looks up at her with a smile of her own. 

"You seemed to know where you were going?" Leia asks, despite the fact that she should get up and go back and find her bed, but the grass is dry underneath her now and the air is warming, and Luke is a quiet comfort with none of the huge, screaming _pity and sympathy and grief_ that's been aimed at her since they arrived, from strangers and the few Alderaanians here both.

"Uh--- yeah," he says, nodding and finally sitting down, a little belatedly, "while we were getting ready earlier, I heard some of the pilots and techs talk about wishing they could've gone for a dip in the pool outside, before they all got blown up." He grimaces and Leia's not sure whether it's for the execution squad humour or---

"I couldn't really believe they were talking about taking a bath. In _water_!" 

She hides her grin behind a hand at Luke's tone and nods, seriously. The glance he gives her, half exasperated, half outraged still (or maybe again, at the memory), makes it clear it's _not_ the humour he was grimacing about.

"So I asked Wedge, and he told me where it was. I just wanted to..." Luke trails off, ducking his head to hide the sudden burn on his face, "... Aunt Beru would've... would've loved to see this." He sounds as if there is crushed glass in his voice, having to force the words out, and she can see the suppressed, quickly-blinked-away glitter of tears.

Leia swallows again and leans forward, catching his still-wet but drying hand and squeezes. Hesitates until Luke looks up at her, frowning as if he can feel the spiked ball of _emotion_ (she will not acknowledge it further) that is lodged in her throat, in her gut, that has taken the place of her heart.

"My... my parents would've taken you to a really nice little mountain lake. My favourite," she says, and is fiercely proud she gets through that sentence without breaking, though her voice probably sounds like Luke's had, just earlier. Luke smiles at her, pale and aching and she knows she's mirroring it. In a few hours she'll smile in other ways, Luke will too she's sure, but at the moment...

The sky is as blue as the pool in front of them, the grey and violet chased away by the sun, and Leia finds herself relaxing. Luke is drooping as well.

Five hours later, she's woken by a fly on her nose, head on Luke's shoulder and his head on hers. It's not as awkward as it should be, when she shakes him awake and he casts a last look at the pool before tugging on his boots and following her back to the temple, looking adorably worried when she mentions clothes and the ceremony.

She laughs and promises him they'll find something - and as they follow the path around a tree, she catches a last look of the pool and wishes, suddenly, that this award ceremony could find him dressed in blue.

She ignores the ache at that thought and resolves to simply find him something that _fits_.

It will be enough.

They survived, the sky above Yavin IV is blue and occasionally still streaked with meteors of falling debris.

It will be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I imagine this being, tentatively, connected with my fic Leia's Nightmare as well (since rain isn't the same as a pool of water).


End file.
